Trivy vs Checkmarx One
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free and open source
Open sourceQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Free and open source. You pay in engineering time and CI minutes.
Enterprise annual licensing, typically by developer count or lines of code. Six figures at scale.
Free tier
Everything, self-hosted
Free trial.
Open source
Apache-2.0
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Aqua Security · since 2019
Widely used
Checkmarx · since 2006
Strengths
- Free and covers container, IaC, secret and dependency scanning in one binary.
- Fast enough to run on every image build without slowing the pipeline.
- Excellent Kubernetes integration through the Trivy Operator.
- Very deep SAST analysis with wide language coverage including legacy enterprise languages.
- One platform and one risk view across every scan type.
- Strong compliance and audit reporting.
Limitations
- No hosted dashboard or workflow — findings go to your pipeline output.
- No reachability analysis, so alert volume is high on large images.
- Reporting for compliance requires building it yourself.
- Expensive, with a long procurement and deployment cycle.
- High false-positive volume typical of deep SAST; tuning is a project.
- Scans are slow relative to developer-first tools.
Best for
Container and Kubernetes pipelines that need free, comprehensive scanning.
Large enterprises with a security function and regulatory obligations.
All of these integrate with: Jenkins.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.